The Fighting Meins: MMA is the family business for Jordan and Lee Mein

If you take a quick glance at Jordan Mein‘s career stats, you might be forgiven for assuming there must be some mistake.

The kid from Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, is only 23 years old, so how can he already have 35 professional fights? The math doesn’t work out, at least not according to any of the conventional wisdom that tells us how MMA careers typically go.

Maybe that’s because most fighters don’t spend their childhoods in a fight gym, as Mein did. And most don’t have fathers who are not only fighters themselves, but also local MMA promoters.

Thanks to Lee Mein, Jordan had both. He also had an amateur MMA career that began when he was 14 years old, and a pro career that kicked off with a loss to current UFC welterweight Rory MacDonald when Mein was only 16.

That was in June of 2006. By the time the year was out, Mein had fought six times as a professional, even if he still wasn’t old enough to fight in some Canadian provinces.

“For the most part, it was pretty normal to us,” Mein’s father, Lee, 45, told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). “He grew up in the gym, competing and doing it. It didn’t raise too many eyebrows.”

The way Jordan remembers it, those early years were all about seizing every opportunity. That’s how he ended up fighting 20 more times in the next four years, while most other boys his age were still trying to settle on a major or a girlfriend.

“We just wanted the experience of getting in there, traveling all over to fight, getting that experience,” Mein said. ” … That’s been kind of the motto of our team: If you’re healthy, get in there.”

That helps to explain how he ended up here, on the UFC on FOX 7 card, just a little over a month after his victorious UFC debut against Dan Miller at UFC 158. When welterweight Dan Hardy was pulled from the lineup due to a heart condition, the UFC called Mein’s father, who serves as trainer, manager, mentor – “all of the above,” according to Jordan.

They didn’t need to discuss it all that much, he said. A chance to step in against an opponent like Matt Brown (16-11 MMA, 6-5 UFC), and on the main card of a network TV event? Mein (27-8 MMA, 1-0 UFC) had taken short-notice fights before, and with less to gain. So had his father, whose record includes bouts against the likes of Jeff Monson, Dan Severn and Rolles Gracie. They didn’t take those fights just for fun, either.

“It was for experience,” Lee said. “Total mat time for anything, repetition, that’s key. There are so many elements to the fight game it would take you a lifetime to get good at all of them, so why not get started? The best way to find out if it’s working or not is in a fight.”

This is the attitude that the elder Mein passed on to his son from an early age. Lee began training in MMA back when people still weren’t entirely sure if that was the name of the sport. He’d always been interested in the martial arts, he said. He worked security, and “always wanted to find out what would work best if my life was on the line.” MMA covered a lot of bases.

It only made sense to bring his son along to the gym, where he picked up some kickboxing here, a little jiu-jitsu there, all while his dad was testing his skills in the cage and bringing his sometimes painful lessons back for the benefit of his students.

“Most of the opportunities came up to fight top guys, and it was just to see where you’re at and what you’ve been working on and if it’s working or not,” Lee said. “That was the challenge for me. Then I’d go back to teaching and could say, this worked and this didn’t.”

He never forced his son to fight or even to train, he said. And when Jordan chose to train, Lee did his best to treat him like any other student, to the point where he still can’t quite get himself to admit that being in his son’s corner for his UFC debut was any more of a thrill than getting other fighters from his academy into the same spot. When Jordan was a kid, he got the same blanket invitation to the next tournament as all the others. It was always, here’s the date and location. If you want to come along, put your name in. And more often than not, Jordan did.

“He’s never pressured me into anything, or been any harder on me than he is on any other teammate of mine,” Mein said of his father. “I think that’s why I’ve stuck with it for so long. I’ve never had to do any of the training or anything. It’s always been my choice.”

Even if, style-wise, the welterweight son has little in common with his heavyweight father (“He goes all out in the first round,” Jordan said of his dad. “He just blitzes hard. I can be a little more conservative and have longer fights.”), they share the same mentality in just about every other aspect of the fight game.

Healthy? Then you might as well go fight. Think it’ll be a tough one? Good, it’ll only make you better.

It’s worked out well so far for Jordan, who made a name for himself in the waning days of Strikeforce before making the move to the UFC with an impressive first-round TKO win in his debut. Now that he’s stepping in to fight a hard-nosed brawler like Brown on short-notice, it’s as if he finally knows what his father was preparing him for all those years. The experience they were chasing back when he was a teenager has to help now, Mein said, “because I’m in that situation again and I’ve done it before.”

As always, his dad will be right there in his corner when he does it again on Saturday night. Win or lose, there’s something in this for Lee, too.

“I get to spend time with my son every day,” he said. “We might not be watching movies or golfing together or something casual. We’re working hard, but it’s what we want to be doing. I love my job, and he loves his.”

It might not be most people’s idea of a family business, but then most families aren’t like the Meins.

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